Dupe, a new app created by veteran entrepreneur Bobby Ghoshal, is already being hyped by some big names in tech.
Online shoppers these days love themselves a good dupe—internet slang for a “duplicate” product that looks just like a pricier name-brand article of clothing, bottle of perfume, or other luxury good. To date, videos hashtagged #dupe have racked up nearly 6 billion views on TikTok, where it’s becoming more common to see influencers do paid ads for brands you haven’t heard of before, but the products are dead ringers for items you know.
However, this system leaves buyers at the mercy of B-list brand ambassadors or service-journalism listicles like “Why Spend $700 on This Luxury Doodad When These Excellent Dupes Will Do?” where the five alternatives were scavenged by a reporter in one afternoon. A new app, called Dupe, says it’s arrived to give consumers more choices—for furniture only, right now—by scouring the entire internet for visually similar-ish replicas of sofas, tables, rugs, and home items they’re eyeing but can’t afford.
“We’ve all been there before,” Dupe tells visitors to the app. “Instantly obsessed with an interior piece, only to feel that pang of disappointment when you realize it costs more than your entire renovation budget. But what if you could experience the thrill of scoring those covetable home picks without the spirit-crushing markups? Now you’re duping.”
Dupe was founded by Bobby Ghoshal, cofounder and CEO of Carrot, an app that already connects users with cheaper alternatives to products they’re viewing online. Nikita Bier, creator of the high-school social networks Gas and TBH, served as an advisor. Both began pushing the new project late Sunday, claiming that they’re “ushering in generative shopping.”
Users simply go to the webpage of the furniture item in question, type “dupe.com/” before the page’s full address in the URL bar, and press enter. In a walk-through video posted on X (formerly Twitter), Ghoshal begins by explaining, “I’ve got champagne taste, but I’ve got a beer budget.” On his screen is a Pierre Jeanneret kangaroo chair being sold for $32,500 on the website 1stDibs. Dupe gets activated; it spits out a dozen low-slung wicker chairs indistinguishable from Jeanneret’s that are available on sites like eBay, Wayfair, and AliExpress for $169 to $433.
Within hours, Dupe was being hyped by Big Tech voices like Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and investor Sahil Bloom.
The fresh platform had a few glitches, and was sluggish too under Monday’s unexpectedly heavy traffic. An advanced feature where a live human finds you your dupes was temporarily unavailable when Fast Company attempted to test it out, thanks to the high volume of requests.
“I didn’t expect this to go so viral so fast,” Ghoshal told us.
What caught Fast Company off guard, though, was duping’s moral and legal implications. For instance, our inaugural request was to have dupes for the Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, a midcentury furniture piece so famous (and expensive, around $8,000), it’s been at the center of lawsuits where the company, Herman Miller, accused the dupers of committing trademark infringement. Dupe gave us three near-carbon copies at a fraction of the price from Wayfair, AliExpress, and a Chinese company called CurverK that apparently specializes in producing “exact replicas” of iconic furniture designs by such well-known companies as Herman Miller.
Ghoshal said they’re working to give users a way to “report scam sites” that the Dupe team can “actively block and tackle.” “We’ve already blocked a large amount of them,” he added. “It’s day 0, so we just need some running room to get it going.”
He added that Dupe wasn’t created to help dupers leach off bigger, more established brands—though its purpose statement suggests they wouldn’t be scandalized by a little bit of leaching: “When you fit out your home through Dupe, you get that same electrifying rush of scoring a major deal on decor you’ve been coveting,” the About Us page reads. “That smug validation of knowing your place looks straight out of the catalogs while your bank account stays happily intact.”
Ghoshal told Fast Company their official position is to do “what’s best for the consumer while helping brands get earned visibility at crucial points in their shopping journey.” He insisted that means, somewhat counterintuitively, even the higher-end players: For critics who gripe they’re allowing free-riders to exploit designers’ creative output, he suggests giving the app a cheap dupe to, in effect, un-dupe. He argued in this way, Dupe can “solve both problems” by helping users “to buy upscale,” too.
We gave this a try with several classic furniture pieces, which the app handled with mixed results. Marcel Breuer’s Wassily armchair—part of the Met’s contemporary art collection, so-named because of painter Wassily Kandinsky’s obsession with it, and now owned by Knoll—is world-famous. A real one starts at $3,633. But Wayfair stocks a legion of dupes, including the one we fed into the app: Ivy Bronx’s Torvehallerne Leather Accent Armchair for $340.
Unfortunately, Dupe glitched and thought we were eyeing either a rug or throw pillow cover. It fared better with a $116 Bed Bath & Beyond knockoff of the renowned Bertoia chair. While it still didn’t offer dupes of the actual $1,197 wire chair, the app did suggest several upscale chairs by Design Within Reach, Audo, Crate & Barrel, and Roweam that varied in price from $399 to $6,800.
“At the end of the day, this is about challenging the UX of shopping, being creative, and giving e-comm a breath of fresh air from the usual funnels users get,” Ghoshal told Fast Company. “General feedback has been, ‘This is a godsend.’”